Blog do Curso de Medicina da Universidade Estadual de Maringá para a discussão de temas de Educação Médica, Educação das Profissões da Saúde e áreas correlatas.
Blog of University of Maringá Medical School for the discussion of issues of Medical Education, Health Professions Education and related areas.

quinta-feira, 31 de dezembro de 2015

Learning how to learn

The Most Popular Online Course Teaches You to Learn

By John Markoff

The world’s
most popular online course is a general introduction to the art of
learning, taught jointly by an educator and a neuroscientist.

“Learning How To
Learn,” which was created by Barbara Oakley, an electrical engineer, and
Terry Sejnowski, a neuroscientist, has been ranked as the leading class
by enrollment in a survey of the 50 largest online courses released earlier this month by the Online Course Report website.

The course is “aimed
at a broad audience of learners who wanted to improve their learning
performance based on what we know about how brains learn,” said Dr.
Sejnowski, the director of the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at
the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif.

With 1,192,697
students enrolled since the course was created last year, “Learning How
to Learn,” which is offered by the University of California through
Coursera, an online learning company which has partnered with a number
of universities, has narrowly edged out the more tightly focused course,
“Machine Learning,” taught by Stanford University professor Andrew Ng,
which currently has 1,122,031 students enrolled.

The similar enrollment
figures are striking in part because the field of machine learning has
become one of the hottest university areas of study in recent years.
High technology companies are competing intensely in Silicon Valley and
elsewhere for newly minted data scientists.

The enrollment figures
indicate that massively open online courses, or MOOCs, which in 2012
emerged as a potentially disruptive force that some believed might
threaten the modern educational system, are continuing to evolve and
gaining broad acceptance as part of an increasingly diverse marketplace
for online education.

The Achilles heel of
the MOOC phenomena has been that while enrollments have been huge, the
number of students who actually complete courses for credit has remained
low. That has led traditional educators to argue that the new
technology would fail because students are generally less motivated to
complete coursework online.

The completion rate —
or “stickiness” — of the “Learning How to Learn” course has been above
20 percent, said Dr. Sejnowski, roughly twice the average for most
MOOCs. He said the course is now attracting about 2,000 new students a
day from 200 countries. The course was created after the two researchers
met at the National Science Foundation-financed Science of Learning
Center at the University of California at San Diego, which Dr. Sejnowski
directs.

Dr. Oakley, a
professor of engineering at Oakland University in Michigan, acknowledged
that although only roughly 50,000 of the more than one million
enrollees in her course had actually received a certificate for the
course, certification was the wrong metric to understand the impact of
the new form of online education.

“People frame it
incorrectly,” she said. “Students are clearly hungry to learn, and
they’re particularly hungry for practically useful, scientifically based
information told in a way that they can really get it.”

She is a passionate advocate of the MOOC concept against a range of academic critics. She recently wrote an essay
defending online education technologies. Dr. Oakley claims there is
evidence that the course has touched a nerve more broadly from a diverse
audience that is eager to acquire to improve their learning skills.

She cited a range of
groups who are promoting the course from the California State Prison
System, federal K-12 teacher certificate programs, as well as refugee
camps in Somalia and Sudan, where she asserted that students threatened
to overwhelm the meager Internet bandwidth available in those countries.

There is evidence that
MOOCs are being fed by a broad base of “life-long learning” interest
said Merrill Cook, editor of the Online Course Report.

“Your average person taking a MOOC has a bachelors degree and is in their 30s,” he said.

He noted that there is
now an increasing proliferation of a range of different online learning
offerings beyond MOOCs. That can be seen in the shift in strategy in
one of the earliest commercial efforts in the new approach to teaching.

Take Udacity, which
was founded by Sebastian Thrun, an artificial intelligence researcher
who taught at Stanford and then founded Google’s X Lab research effort.
After first offering MOOCs, the Mountain View, Calif.-based firm shifted
its strategy and now offers “Nanodegrees” to train online customers in
very specific skills.

“If I look back at the
MOOC hype, what actually happened was that people equated a cheaper
delivery method with the replacement of the entire educational system,”
Dr. Thrun said. “A cheaper technology is not the same as a business
revolution.”